


Reckless Seekers of Beauty

by downtheroadandupthehill



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Deadwood AU, F/M, Gun Violence, M/M, Prostitution, old west au, though knowing the show Deadwood is unnecessary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-01
Updated: 2013-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-04 00:41:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/704491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downtheroadandupthehill/pseuds/downtheroadandupthehill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire comes to his side, and shrugs. His freshly-fired gun is still in clutched in a loose fist. “Not drunk enough this early to shoot that well.” He spits onto the dead man’s face. “Fucking bastard.” He looks up then, and squints at Enjolras through sunlight and dirt that winds through the air. “Good shot,” he adds. “Can I buy you a drink?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reckless Seekers of Beauty

There is unrest in Deadwood, but then that is nothing new.

Enjolras is only a month in the ramshackle town, setting up a tent of mining supplies with Combeferre and Courfeyrac. They had dragged him out to the Dakota region, insisting that this was the time to make a minor fortune from all of the prospectors who’d headed that way months ago, and the three of them started up a sorry excuse for a hardware store. Only a month and money was trickling in, the investment worth it. His friends had been right, as loathe as Enjolras was to admit it. The Black Hills were rich with gold, they’d been told time and time again, and folks needed to spend it somewhere. Might as well spend it on goods meant to acquire them a bit more gold.

A thoughtless venture, but he would return home to Ohio soon, he told himself on a daily basis.

He’d studied law, in Akron, and spent a few months as a Marshall in Kansas, where he’d worked with Combeferre, and together they’d met Courfeyrac. Now he found himself in a lawless place, an illegal settlement--declared so by the government of the United States itself--full of grasping men and worn-hard women. His time as a Marshall had only prepared him slightly, for life in a place like this.

Luckily his father taught him how to use a gun before he died, and to use it well.

It’s early yet, only a little past sunrise, and most of the miners have already trekked out to their gold claims and begun to dig for their dreams. The street, the main thoroughfare of the place, is nearly empty while the rest of town lies in bed with their whores and their headaches from too much whiskey the night before. 

Two figures pass on horseback, slow like idling tourists. Their trotting mares--matching  black coats, damp from a long ride in summer’s heat--only kick up a little dirt as they pass, and Enjolras does not need to shield his eyes against it.

A man and a woman, young, and both too pretty for this place.

(A dark-haired whore had told _him_ that, his first night in. _Too pretty for this place_ , she murmured into his ear, and he had only frowned. She moved on to Courfeyrac after that--far easier prey.)

This woman is stunning, all blonde hair and wide, blue eyes. Her nose and cheeks are pink from too much sun--she doesn’t wear a hat--and--an odd thing, that--in trousers, with leather boots buttoned up to her knee. Her head is cocked toward the man beside her, full lips grinning as her gaze darts from building to building, taking stock of their surroundings. The man beside her is ordinary in comparison, save for the riot of his hair. A cloud of black, curling around his forehead and his ears and the back of his neck, moving wild with the slightest breeze even beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Enjolras could swear he’s seen him before--a sketch in a newspaper somewhere, perhaps, though he can’t quite remember the name attached.

Some sort of gunfighter--or a lawman, the kinder term for men like that--who went around the Territories and got into a few too many scrapes, enough to make him too famous for his own good, even if Enjolras cannot recall his name. From the drawings in the newspapers, he’d imagined him to be older, too.

As they pass, the man tips his hat in their direction, and his lips curl into a smirk. The woman nods, too, and her steady smile might even be called dazzling.

He glances at Courfeyrac, after they are gone, and waits for one of his usual sort of remarks. But Courfeyrac collapses in his chair, shrugs, and crosses his arms with a sigh. “I wouldn’t mess with _her_ ,” he says. “Beautiful yes, but deadly, too. I’ve heard the tales.”

Enjolras raises his eyebrows and taps his fingers on the wooden tabletop, and Combeferre chimes in with, “Cosette Fauchelevent and ‘the Devil’ Grantaire. They’re often in the papers.”

_So that was his name_. Though the title was foolish, and he wondered what journalist had made that one up out of thin air.

He had heard of them, and read about them, of course. Dangerous exploits like duels and shootouts, while no jury could manage to convict them. Apparently, all of their killings were perfectly justified, at least according to the courts.

They would fit in well, in lawless little Deadwood, though God knows what they were doing here.

.....

A dark-haired whore watches from the window while she pulls her skirt back on. She looks back at the man still in her bed and smiles fondly. Eponine would like to lay with him a while longer--she feels so _safe_ there, in his arms--but there’s work to be done, even this early in the morning. Clean up the blood and vomit and spilled booze in the saloon from the night before, take a bath in lukewarm water. Soap if she scrounge some up from somewhere, and a spritz of heavy perfume. She’s young and fresh-faced enough that she doesn’t need to rouge her cheeks. Speak sweetly to Montparnasse for a cup of whiskey, on the house, maybe, or at least half price.

Marius groans and tries to sit, scrubbing freckled hands over a freckled face.

“Morning,” he says, through a voice still hoarse with sleep.

“Good morning,” she replies, and leans over to kiss him on the corner of his mouth. Kisses cost a penny, but this one is for free. She hands him his clothes, while he tries to burrow back into the unclean, muslin sheets.

“Coming back tonight?”

The resounding _yes_ is like music to her ears.

While she mops the Musain’s floor an hour later, she hums a little melody to herself, a tune she’s made up on her own. There are words to it in her head, something about butterflies and dandelions. Montparnasse snaps and barks eventually, as he always does, and Eponine only hums a little quieter.

Musichetta had gotten out, by marrying the doctor, lived now with him and her other favorite regular. It was a strange arrangement, though the doctor had helped them all, at one time or another, and so the town refrained from gossip. They rarely saw each other any more, though Eponine imagines her, beautiful and incandescent and _happy._

.....

Marius stumbles toward home-- _home_ , a small room with a smaller mattress and a few spare changes of clothing. The walls are too thin, and when he’s there he can hear his neighbors fighting and fucking and fighting again. He left the rest of his belongings at his grandfather’s estate in Alabama, when he’d run off to Deadwood to find his own fortune, and not one built on the shoulders of slavery. It’s only a small gold strike he’s uncovered so far, tiny in comparison to others, but something to live on his own with for now. But he can’t remember the last time he spent the night at home, doesn’t care to. Home might be a dark-eyed girl with an unhappy slant to her mouth. She’s warm and she makes him laugh, and that might be enough for him. His hands fit well enough along the curves of her waist, and her hands in his hair, too.

Until he is struck by a _vision_ on the road, an angel perhaps, and Marius is lost.

She looks back, right at him, and the violence of her stare is like a bullet in his chest.

.....

The first time that Enjolras speaks to him, it is after one of them kills a man. Enjolras had heard talk in the saloon--that man had been the one to lead the raid on the Donoghue family, and even killed the children. He’d walked into town like it was nothing, pretended he’d come across some random raid, and earned himself a few free drinks for telling the story. But after the news was spread, Cosette had rode the twenty miles out of town and found the little girl who survived, the hem of her dress stained with her mother’s blood.

A mistake, leaving a survivor like that.

Enjolras had heard the gossip in the Musain, but Grantaire had it from Cosette herself, a half-smile on her face as she nodded at the killer in the street, because she knows how the rest of this story goes. She shepherds the girl away to her room, to clean her up and try to talk to her kindly--Cosette always had a way with children, even if she might otherwise be considered unnatural, for a woman.

They approach the man separately, and come together, entirely on accident. Enjolras’s hand is at his holster, while Grantaire’s gun is already drawn. Enjolras has ideas about the law, doing things properly, but to Grantaire a killer is a killer, and he’s killed enough of them to know.

But then the man goes for the pistol at his hip, and that makes Enjolras’s decision for him.  

Two shots, within less than a second of one another. Enjolras has always been a fast draw, and there’s two matching plumes of smoke from the barrels of the well-used weapons in each of their hands, and there’s a dead man on the ground before them.

“You think you got him?” Enjolras asks, walking over to the body. Gun back in its holster. The corpse on the ground has a hole right between its eyes. Dead center.

Grantaire comes to his side, and shrugs. His freshly-fired gun is still in clutched in a loose fist. “Not drunk enough this early to shoot that well.” He spits onto the dead man’s face. “Fucking bastard.” He looks up then, and squints at Enjolras through sunlight and dirt that winds through the air. “Good shot,” he adds. “Can I buy you a drink?”

They leave the body behind them in the street. Someone will bring it the doctor to examine, and Enjolras knows that he himself will be the one to make sure it gets something akin to a Christian burial, before someone else can feed it to their hogs.

.....

She remembers what it’s like to be a little girl, and to watch her mother die. The waif clings fast to her hand, and Cosette tries to soften herself, for the girl’s sake. From the man at the hotel’s front desk, she orders a small tub of warm water brought up to her room, because there’s nothing quite as comforting as a bath.

That, and she needs to wipe away the smear of blood across the girl’s cheek, and on the bottoms of her bare feet from where she must have stepped in it.

She’s taken care of Grantaire, when he’s been in far worse straits than this, and drunk besides, and she will manage with this girl, too.

Cosette remembers her father’s warm embrace, the taste of the simple meals he cooked for her after she had wormed her way into his heart and his only temporary home. In the hotel room, she worries at her lower lip with her teeth and glances to the window, though she’s already made sure it opens wide enough for her to fit through. She will always remember how to run, how to flee, even if she doesn’t have to anymore.

The girl doesn’t let go of her hand, sweaty palms and fingers locked tight together, while Cosette remembers what it’s like. She would hug her close, if further touch would not make her flinch away. It isn’t worth the risk, the break in trust that is new and fragile like glass.

A handsome boy no older than herself stays only trapped in the back of Cosette’s mind.

.....

For Enjolras’s one drink, Grantaire has three. Whiskey, slung back quickly, and Enjolras watches the other man swallow each one, while he only sips at his. He’s still unused to how it burns his tongue, the back of his throat, and all the way down into his belly. Grantaire is more practiced, almost graceful in the way he takes each shot.

“I won a few hands of poker here last night. Dealer let me win the first two. Turns out I’m good for business. Drink up,” he tells him, and hands him another small glass of the stuff, although Enjolras has yet to finish his first one. “Do you gamble?”

“Not really.” With Grantaire watching, Enjolras tries to imitate him, and the other men in Deadwood. His second glass of whiskey finished in one swallow leaves him damp-eyed and coughing hard.

Grantaire slaps him on the back, laughing, and not maliciously. His hand is warm where it comes to rest, just beneath his shoulder blade. “Well at least you shoot damned good,” he comments, and orders another round. “Where’d you learn?”

“My father taught me.”

The sharp-eyed barman watches them. Montparnasse is always listening, and if he isn’t then you can be sure his whores are. One lingers in the corner with a broom in her hands, the top of her dress only half-buttoned. It’s not late enough for real business to start, not yet.

“Your fucking father didn’t teach you how to kill a man,” Grantaire says. It isn’t a question. He can read Enjolras’s breeding in the straightness of his spine, the elegant tilt of his chin. “You don’t come from wherever the hell it is you came from and learn how to kill a man.”

“I spent some time as a Marshall, in Abilene. I liked being able to help the people who needed it.”

“ _Hanging_ men, not shooting them straight in the head on the fucking street.”

“Shooting them in the street, when they don’t come along quietly. You might’ve given him a chance, you know, before pulling your gun out like that.” 

Grantaire shrugs, allows his hand to slip from where it had settled on Enjolras’s back, and laughs again. This time, Enjolras can hear the edge in it, like a blade in need of sharpening. 

.....

Marius does not come to the Musain that night. Eponine watches the door carefully for any sign of that familiar face that she had come to claim as hers--certainly, the other girls knew not to go anywhere near him, lest they face her wrath, but he fails to make an appearance. It’s only then she allows herself to be tugged into the lap of an ugly fellow who smells like dirt and sweat and Montparnasse’s dope. His beard scratches at her collarbone, and other places, too.

She’s left nursing bruises on her wrists and shoulders, after she pulls her clothes back on and staggers back downstairs. 

Montparnasse only grins and _tsks_ at her, but he’s learned better than to try and touch. “You’re only lucky he didn’t mar that pretty face. Have a whiskey, then, and back to work, love.”

 


End file.
